when i speak of poetry, i am not talking about versifying or wordsmithing. i am speaking about creating lives of passion, intensity and wonder. i call those people poets who go into the world with creative intention of living life to the full, they may then choose to express the wonder,the intensity,the passion - the marvelous - that they discover in words, but the words are not their poetry - their lives.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Playful Violence

"I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing." -Raoul Vaneigem

The playful violence of insurgence has no room for regret. Regret weakens the force of blows and makes us cautious and timid. But regret only comes in when violence is dealt with as a moral question, and for insurgents who are fighting for the freedom to live their desires, morality is just another form of social control. Wherever rebel violence has manifested playfully, regret seems absurd. In riots (other than police riots) and spontaneous uprisings - as well as in small-scale vandalism - a festive attitude seems to be evident.

There is an intense joy, even euphoria, in the release of violent passions that have been pent up for so long. Bashing in the skull of society as we experience it on a daily basis is an intense pleasure, and one to be savored, not repudiated in shame, guilt or regret. Some may object that such an attitude could cause our violence to get out of hand, but an excess of insurgent violence is not something that we need to fear. As we break down our repression and begin to free our passions, certainly our gestures, our actions and our entire way of being are bound to become increasingly expansive and all we do we will seem to do to excess.

Our generosity will seem excessive and our violence will seem excessive. Unrepressed, expansive individuals squander in all things. Riots and insurrections have failed to get beyond temporary release, not because of excess, but because people hold themselves back. People have not trusted their passions. They have feared the expansiveness, the squandering excess of their own dreams and desires. So they have given up or turned their fight over to new authorities, new systematizers of violence.

But how can insurgent violence ever be truly excessive when there is no institution of social control, no aspect of authority, no icon of culture that should not be smashed to powder - and that gleefully?